1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to an improved computer system and, in particular, to a method and apparatus for generating pages. Still more particularly, the present disclosure relates to a method and apparatus for generating web pages for display on a browser.
2. Background
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. The Internet is commonly used to access information resources and services. These information resources and services include documents and applications. In particular, the World Wide Web is an information system accessed via the Internet. This information system is a collection of documents that are linked to each other. These documents are called web pages.
The web pages may be accessed through an application called a web browser on a computer. This application facilitates retrieving, presenting, and traversing information using web pages. A web page may include text, images, video, multimedia components, or other information. In addition, the web page navigation components are in the form of hyperlinks which are often referred to as just links.
A web page may have fixed content and dynamic content. The fixed content may be particular areas in the web page. The dynamic content may be advertisements. In another example, the dynamic content may be information requested by the user. For example, a user may send a request to view banking transactions, current balances, order histories, and other information that may be specific to the user.
Currently, a user requests a web page by selecting a link on a current web page, entering a universal resource locator, or through some other action using a browser. The requested web page is typically generated by a Web page server in a remote location and sent to the browser.
For example, the requested web page may be generated using hypertext markup language (HTML), cascading style sheets (CSS), and Java code for the web page. The hypertext markup language may define static content for the web page. The cascading style sheets describe the look and formatting for the web page. The Java code may be used to generate dynamic content for the web page. The generation of the dynamic content may be performed using a Java service page (JSP) servlet located on the web page server. This dynamically generated web page is then returned to the browser.
The generation of the web pages uses resources on the web page server. For example, the web page server interprets the markup language, scripts, and other code for the web page to generate the web page that is sent to the browser for display. If the amount of traffic on a web page server is high enough, the generation of the web page and sending the web page to the browser may take more time than desired.
For example, a web page server for a popular website may have requests in the thousands per second or tens of thousands per second during high levels of traffic at the website. With this level of traffic, requests may be handled by multiple web page servers to avoid undesired levels of response times for web pages.
Additionally, a web page may have many different versions of a web page. Each version may be a separate web page for static web pages or content may be present for the different versions for a dynamic web page. The information for these different versions may use more storage space than desired in addition to the processing issues described above.
With the processing resources needed at web servers and the storage space needed for different versions of web pages, the resources needed to generate web pages may be more than available or more expensive than desired. Therefore, it would be desirable to have a method and apparatus that take into account at least some of the issues discussed above, as well as other possible issues. For example, it would be desirable to have a method and apparatus that overcome the technical problems of the large amounts of time and effort needed to provide different versions of web pages to perform operations and insufficient resources for web page servers being present to generate web pages sent to client data processing systems.